Square maps Super Bowl spending in New Orleans

Calculating the economic benefits of hosting the Super Bowl is an inexact science, as is calculating where and to whom those benefits accrue.

But Square, a company that provides retail businesses with the ability to accept mobile credit card payments, is providing one way to answer these questions — imperfect as it is.

Square compared New Orleans sales using its system in the two weekends before and leading up to the Super Bowl and took the comparison one step further by geographically plotting those sales. It’s obviously important to keep in mind that Square caters to specific types of businesses, typically those that previously were cash only, according to Atlantic Cities.

So it’s an unrepresentative sample but it’s a sample nonetheless, and the results are notable. Square sales increased 60 percent, from $500,000 to $800,000, and it’s no surprise that those sales were heavily concentrated in the French Quarter over the Super Bowl weekend.

The geographic variations between the two weekends, however, are interesting. For example, Kenner’s lakefront has a small, bright concentration in first of the two maps, but it vanishes on the second. Lakefront Airport, which caters to the private jet crowd, shows activity on the second weekend but not the first.